‘Yaka and the Gods of War’ by Yak Handa

At the time of the 25th Summit of Nato, Yaka reminds us of some memorable things…

The world’s most cruel war makers, torturers, mass bombers, plus its most deadly weapons makers and buyers – hyped as ‘the most successful military alliance in history,’ though few know who they really are – will parade in 100 Ford and Chrysler motorcades throughout Chicago from this Sunday, hosted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, US President Obama’s first chief of staff.

Welcome to the 25th summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by the Michigan Sea (aka Great Lake), boasting 50 participating governments, most of whom cannot directly access the Atlantic of its name. It is billed as a fundraiser to escalate white wars on Asia! It is also being held amidst a US policy advance: not just military occupation but also covert ‘targeted killings’ of civilians everywhere. Will all this murder postpone capitalism’s long-awaited demise?

The NATO conclave comes two weeks after Shokri Ghanem, Libya’s former prime minister and top oil official, who defected to them from Ghaddafi’s government, was drowned in Austria – sending him floating down Vienna’s Blue Danube‎ after NATO took over in Tripoli.

Devastating Libya, and bent on destabilizing Syria to attack Iran, this US-led war machine now confabs to escalate their 4-billion-dollar-a-year war on Afghanistan, after imperialist forces will supposedly pull out in 2014: a war by the ‘roof of the world’ to divide the great production centers of Asia (South, East, Central, North and West) from each other.

For this war, England has already pledged $110 million annually from 2015, and on Wednesday Australia promised $300 million over three years. Yet the NATO summit starts a day after the G8 nations, involving the largest capitalist economies, met to deal with Europe’s financial ‘crisis’ at heavily guarded Camp David, Maryland – presumably moved from Chicago to dilute protests against both itself and NATO.

After Russia decided not to attend either meeting, Pakistan – who blocked NATO supply routes to Afghanistan due to drone attacks – was invited at the last minute to the NATO orgy. (Upset about Russia’s attitude, England’s Economist magazine whinged on Friday, that Russia’s chief of the general staff, Nikolai Makarov, recently spoke openly about a first strike against future US missile-defence installations in Poland and Romania.

Come or blow Chicago
The $55 million NATO summit boasts two long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) aka ‘sound cannon’, which cause deafness, to disperse crowds; new riot armor for horses and men, and the latest surveillance cameras. (The US navy developed LRADS to fend off attacks by small boats, as on the USS Cole in Yemen’s Aden harbor, and is used on East Africa’s seas, and in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones).

To prevent people in the streets using smartphones to coordinate protests, FBI and Secret Services will jam signals. They can shutdown cell towers, under ‘Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) 303’, for official ‘Emergency Wireless Protocols’. SOP allows ‘state homeland security advisors’ to terminate private wireless network connections in the entire metropolitan area, and shut down cell phone networks during the NATO protests.

Chicago’s Metra Electric line will only allow subway riders to carry only one small bag. “Boxes, parcels, luggage, backpacks and bicycles will not be allowed on trains”. Chicago’s 12,000 police will be joined by over 500 National Guard troops (aka ‘The KKK in uniform’, as they usually put down the Black inner cities), Illinois state troopers, and other cities’ police. Chicago’s Police Chief has also promised to “extract” protestors “who need to be extracted.” For unlike other summits, “professionals” will be in charge.

Chicago, watershed of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, capital of the US midwest, has a history of mass murder: from the stealing of the Ottawa, Ojibwa and Potawatomi people’s lands, to the 1884 Haymarket massacre of workers that inspired May Day, to the 1970s massacres of Black Panther Party leaders. But it’s better known as the playpen of Al Capone: the petty retail mafiosi (who helped later-US-President John Kennedy’s father Joe smuggle whisky during the 1920s prohibition on alcohol) who was a hissy pussycat compared to the suited NATO gangsters who will gather here.

Chicago is, after all, home to one of US President Obama’s earliest and biggest funders: Lester Crown, whose father, Chicago mafiosi Henry Crown, fronted the takeover of General Dynamics Corp. (GD) in 1959 and developed it into the largest weapons maker in the world, selling the Trident submarine, the Atlas rocket, the F-16 fighter, the Abrams tank, etc. Israeli intelligence directly links to Obama through Crown. GD’s annual report assured investors: “For 2012, the President has requested Defense Department base-budget funding of $553 billion, including $188 billion for investment accounts.” Since 1998, the US has spent $1.3 trillion waging wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, and $1.8 trillion – to procure new warplanes, warships, weapons and military equipment, of which the US Navy now receives the most, to patrol the Indian Ocean. GD supplies all of the US’s 16 major intelligence agencies – from the CIA to the NRO to the GEOINT – exclusively providing equipment, management and staff for the Department of Homeland Security’s new headquarters in Washington. NATO’s chickens have indeed made themselves at home!

Occupy Chicago (who describes their supporters as the 99%) calls NATO, “The military arm of the 1 percent.”
“Mayor 1 percent Emanuel has issued an invitation to NATO’s warmongers to invade Chicago, bringing the military arm of the 1 percent right here to our city. For some Chicagoans, the presence of military policing will be a taste of the daily reality of communities in Afghanistan and Libya. For other Chicagoans, the warnings of violence downtown echo the reality of police repression they face in their everyday life. NATO is a symptom of the global system of violence and oppression at the hands of the 1 percent.”

Killing minds
So what’s it all about: Zbigniew Brzezinski, US President Carter’s National Security Advisor, and co-founder of the Trilateral Commission with oil baron David Rockefeller, claims a “global political awakening… mainly of younger people in ‘developing’ states who could topple the existing international order….For the first time in human history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive… The resulting global political activism is generating a surge in the quest for personal dignity, cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world painfully scarred by memories of centuries-long alien colonial or imperial domination… The youth of the Third World are particularly restless and resentful… [The] major world powers, new and old, also face a novel reality: while the lethality of their military might is greater than ever, their capacity to impose control over the politically awakened masses of the world is at a historic low. To put it bluntly: in earlier times, it was easier to control one million people than to physically kill one million people; today, it is infinitely easier to kill one million people than to control one million people.”

-Yaka reminds: Zbigniew is an old fox. It is not just killing people – for they need our production – but killing the minds especially of our young people who know that the US and Europe, bodyguards of a dying capitalism, are not as they are hyped up to be.